Tucked away in a stylish Art Deco enclave in the quiet 16th arrondissement (district) of Paris, the Nubar Library (Bibliothèque Nubar) holds Europe’s largest collection of Armenian books, periodicals, visual materials, and personal archives of Ottoman-Armenian political and cultural notables, journalists, and clergy, as well as other individuals.1 As the director Dr. Boris Adjemian explained to me, the Nubar Library was founded in 1928 by Armenian statesman and philanthropist Boghos Nubar and the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). The library serves as a permanent repository for the intellectual heritage and memory of Ottoman-Armenian life following the destruction and near-complete dispersal of Armenians from the Anatolian peninsula during the Great War,2 the constellation of events that has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide.3
Main reading room of the Nubar Library in Paris. Photos provided by the author.
I visited the library to search for traces of several modern Armenian painters–Martiros Sarian, Vardges Sureniants, Panos Terlemezian, and Yegishe Tadevosyan—the subjects of my master’s thesis.4 As I descended from the Passy Métro stop, I enjoyed a marvelously unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower.
Along the short walk to 11 Square Alboni (named for Italian operatic contralto Marietta Alboni), I admired several elegant apartment houses adorned with abstracted floral bas-relief and geometric mosaic panels, as well as ornate ironwork grilles.
Detail of bas-relief panel and ornamental grillwork, 9 Square Alboni, Paris. Architect: Léon Nafilyan.
These connected buildings (including the Nubar Library), I later learned, were designed by architect Léon Nafilyan (1877-1937) who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1900-1905, and, like other Ottoman-Armenian architects until the First World War, constituted part of a busy intercontinental “cultural traffic,” or what art historian Mary Roberts dubs “Istanbul exchanges.”5
Metal grillwork door, 11 Square Alboni, Paris. Architect: Léon Nafilyan.
The construction of this Parisian mini-district began in 1922, at the initiative of a resilient group of Armenian entrepreneurs who established a small company, “Le Patrimoine Immobilier” (“Real Estate Heritage”).
Art Deco leaded glass door and mosaic archway, 9 Square Alboni, Paris. Architect: Léon Nafilyan.
The library’s warm interior boasts expansive wooden reading tables and bookcases, functional card catalogs (one for books, another for periodicals), shelves of old newspapers, architectural plans, boxes of photographs, and other ephemera. The director’s office preserves original 1920s hand-painted mural embellishments—a syncretic Ottoman/art-nouveau mix that serves as a backdrop for a small display of items from the library’s founding era. Among these is a Royal manual typewriter that belonged to Aram Andonian, who was designated by Boghos Nubar as the Library’s first Director and continued to serve in that role until his death in 1951. Although I had previously read several books by and about Andonian, it was not until this visit that I came to understand how his lived experience as a genocide survivor manifested in the founding mission of this institution.
Aram Andonian (1875-1951), photo: AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.
By the beginning of the Great War, Andonian had established himself as a journalist and writer in his native Constantinople. On April 24, 1915, he was among the more than 200 Armenian notables who were arrested en masse and deported to the interior of Anatolia in the Ottoman Young Turk government’s very public opening salvo of an extended campaign of massacres, conscription into labor gangs, sexual violence, and forced migrations.6 Most of his companions were murdered in the following months. But Andonian miraculously survived; he had broken his leg and was thus separated from the group, although eventually deported to a concentration camp in Meskene, Syria. There, he transcribed a series of accounts, with descriptions of Ottoman Armenians exiled in the Mesopotamian wastelands. Andonian endured until the British conquest of Aleppo in October of 1918. Shortly after, he emigrated to France and acted as secretary for the Armenian National Delegation during the 1919 Paris Peace talks and beyond. As a witness and survivor of mass violence, he made it his life’s mission to gather documents as well as individual accounts, some of which were used in postwar Ottoman war crimes trials. The files Andonian amassed also constitute some of the Nubar Library’s most important historical resources. His animating force, however, seemed to be a desire to preserve microhistories and narratives of those who had perished.
In a recollection published in 1921, Andonian wrote:
[T]he British entered Aleppo, bringing with them also freedom. Taking advantage of that, I labored at least to save history, by interrogating those among the survivors who were still capable of recalling the unspeakable terror and atrocities of those past five years. Thousands of women, young girls, and men thus came to see me. They spoke and they wrote. Each of them had their own story to tell and not one of the tortures they had to endure was similar to the others. I used to often think that for each of them, an entire volume would be necessary to write, in order, at least, to assemble in general outlines those terrible sufferings. And there were more than a hundred thousand of them who had a volume of things to tell. And even then, this colossal work would still be missing the stories of those who had fallen, taking with them the loss of a million volumes.7
Dr. Adjemian’s office, including Ottoman-Armenian ephemera, photos of notables and refugees, a plaster maquette of Andreas Ter-Maroukian’s statue of writer Khatchadour Abovian, and Aram Andonian’s typewriter.
The archive Andonian helped establish has continued to expand through bequests and other contributions. It stands today as a microcosm of a vanished Ottoman-Armenian society and an important counter to the continuing denialism of the Ottoman Empire’s successor state, the Republic of Turkey.8
Nubar Library’s director, Dr. Boris Adjemian, handles issues of Վերջին Լուր (Latest News).
In the end, with Dr. Adjemian’s help, I found newspaper and journal articles pertaining to my subjects. And while I’ll always be grateful for Hathitrust, Gallica, GRI, SALT, and other digitized archives, there’s nothing like feeling, handling, weighing (and even smelling) these objects oneself.
The Nubar Library contains materials in Western, Eastern, and Classical Armenian, as well as Ottoman Turkish, French, English, German, and heterographic languages such as Armeno-Turkish. The holdings constitute a rich resource for Armenian historians, but the diversity of sources also means the collection can be valuable for those studying the heterogenous cultural history of the Ottoman Empire, as well as researchers in mass violence, linguistics, art history, and memory studies. Indeed, I believe that the archive itself can be approached as a memory object—a collective effort in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide to consolidate remaining fragments of Ottoman-Armenian life in a building and neighborhood that materialized the aspirations of survivors to reconstitute themselves in the Parisian cosmopolis.
Cover of the 1912 edition of the Ottoman-Armenian writer and publisher Teotoros “Teotig” Labdjindjian’s Everyone’s Almanac (Ամէնուն Տարեցոյցը), a digest of original and reprinted articles in Western Armenian, cultural reviews, biographies, and local news features documenting Ottoman-Armenian life and its post-Great War aftermath, published between 1907-1929.
- The Nubar Library is open to researchers and by appointment only. For more information, please see http://bnulibrary.org.
- Founded by Boghos Nubar and other Armenian notables in Cairo, Egypt in 1906, the AGBU collected funds from diasporan Armenians to support socio-economic, agricultural, and educational development for Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, and to provide humanitarian assistance for victims of famine, earthquakes, or other natural disasters in a non-state, apolitical capacity. By the commencement of the Armenian Genocide in early 1915, and throughout the next decades, the AGBU’s extensive aid network sheltered, fed, transported, educated, and offered vocational training for tens of thousands of refugees across the Middle East and beyond. The AGBU continues its global educational, cultural, and humanitarian missions today, including ongoing support for the Nubar Library.
- Per his autobiography, Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin began in the 1930s to formulate a legal framework for what he came to term “genocide” in 1943-44 (later codified in the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide), years after the Armenian case. The word was coined, in part, as a singular descriptor for the Ottoman Young Turk regime’s anti-Armenian massacres, sexual violence, expropriations, and expulsions from Ottoman Turkey between 1915-18, episodes of violence that encompassed the empire’s Greek and Assyrian populations as well.
- My MA thesis, titled “Armenian Painterly Modernity and the Union of Armenian Artists, 1916-1921,” concerns mobility and diasporic networks in the artistic formation of four late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Ottoman- and Russian-Armenian painters, as well as the proto-national art institution they founded in Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) in 1916.
- Mary Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
- Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). Kévorkian himself served as Director of the Nubar Library from 1987 through 2012 and his monumental volume, the most granular account of the context and processes of the genocide, incorporates data from the files preserved by Andonian.
- Aram Antonean [Aram Andonian], Mets Vochirě: Haykakan verjin kotoratsnerě ev Taleat P‘asha [The Great Crime: The Latest Armenian Massacres and Talat Pasha] (Boston: Bahag [Guard] Press, 1921), 9. My thanks to Dr. Sebouh Aslanian, UCLA, for the translation and for drawing my attention to this passage.
- On the subject of genocide denialism, see Bedross Der Matossian, ed., Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).
